The present invention relates to gaming machines of the type generally referred to as slot machines, fruit machines or poker machines, and in particular the invention provides an improvement to a game played on such a machine.
Players who regularly play gaming machines quickly tire of particular games and therefore it is necessary for manufacturers of these machines to come up with innovative game features that add interest to the games provided on such machines in order to keep the players amused and therefore willing to continue playing the game.
Gaming or poker machines have been well known for many years and have more recently gained considerable popularity, with quite substantial amounts of money wagered on these machines. There is a growing tendency for Governments to legalise the use of gaming machines by licensing operators, with resulting revenue gains through licence fees and taxation of monies invested. The licensed operation of gaming machines is the subject of legislation and regulation. This regulation almost always dictates a minimum percentage payout for a gaming machine. For example, a minimum of 85% of monies invested must be returned as winnings, and manufacturers of gaming machines therefore must design their machines around these regulatory controls.
With the growth that has occurred in the gaming machine market there is intense competition between manufacturers to supply the various existing and new venues. When selecting a supplier of gaming machines, the operator of a venue will often pay close attention to the popularity of various games with their patrons. Therefore, gaming machine manufacturers are keen to devise games which are popular with players, as a mechanism for improving sales.
Many various strategies have been tried in the past to make games more enticing to players, including the commonly known double-up feature, whereby, if a player wins a particular game, they can then risk the winnings of that game in a double-or-nothing mode in which they gamble on a subsequent, and often different, game such as whether a red or black card will be the next card drawn.
Other techniques adopted in the past have been to provide complexity in the numbering and combinations of indicia which would result in a win, thereby hoping to convince the player that there is a greater chance of winning and to keep their interest in a particular game.
Many gaming control authorities do not permit images to be superimposed over a game image if they obliterate a part of the game image that would be used to display the outcome of a game. In the past, game designers were therefore forced to squeeze auxiliary images into small spaces on the periphery of the screen or to make the game area of the screen proportionally smaller, however neither of these are desirable options as they reduce the attractiveness of the game for the player. On the one hand if feature indicators are small they might not be seen by the player and the player might not take advantage of a feature currently on offer by the console. On the other hand if the main game image is too small it will not be attractive to players.